At the tops of their respective games, Aimee Mann and Ted Leo provide such a study in contrasts that a partnership between the two is as intriguing as it is unlikely. Mann, whose “Voices Carry” turns 30 next year, is so wry and reserved that she can crack a joke that you won’t get until a verse or two later. Writing with an acerbic precision, she hides her world-weariness in that shirk of a voice, simultaneously jaded yet still vulnerable.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Leo is a former hardcore punk with a vocal style whose excitability reinforces, rather than undercuts, his smarts. On Hearts of Oak and The Brutalist Bricks, he laid out sociopolitical platforms with such nonchalant specificity that it took a while to realize the darker implications of songs like “Bottled in Cork” and “Me and Mia”. In addition to their predeliction for tongue-in-cheek videos, both he and Mann are fiercely intelligent songwriters, but perhaps the greatest difference between them is that he plays the extrovert and she the introvert. His songs reach out into the world, while hers look more deeply inside herself.
The duo joined forces as the Both, and you’d expect that they’d each bring the other out of their respective comfort zones on their debut album. On a few songs, when the tempos surge, they do: On “Milwaukee”, they devise a witty hook and bolster it with handclaps, a growling guitar outro, and lyrics that offer a from-the-stage perspective on their lives as performers. Similarly, the New Pornographic “Volunteers of America” conjures the 1970s pop energy that informed Mann’s last album, 2012's Charmer. Unfortunately, much of the Both is a rocky, frustrating collection of plodding tempos, lackluster hooks, and a pervasive air of mild-mannered gravity. Their insistent emphasis on craft can strangle their songs, as these too-tidy structures and restrained performances undercut the messy emotions of “Pay For It” and the dour “You Can’t Help Me Now”.
The Both mostly serves to highlight the duo’s limitations. Mann's voice has never possessed much expressive range, but she's managed to turn that into a strength. She sounds relatively raw and unrehearsed on “Honesty Is No Excuse”, one of her best moments on the album—but the song descends into a cop-out chorus of yeah-yeah-yeahs, a predictable guitar solo, and some of the mopiest handclaps put to tape. It’s a weird mess. Leo, on the other hand, tends to pen melodies that fit his vocal delivery, often favoring breathless surges of syllables that underscore the urgency of his lyrics. When Mann expertly navigates the snaky folk melody of “Hummingbird”, he can only phrase it awkwardly and sound out of place in that setting.
Despite the lows outnumbering the highs, there remains some promise in this pairing, if only because it can potentially uproot both Mann and Leo from their respective sounds. There are just enough intriguing moments on this debut to point out a viable future for The Both, one where they make music that sounds nothing like their solo material yet still bears the DNA of each parent. At heart, this is an enthusiastic debut that can’t quite live up to its own billing, but at least it shows two veterans who have bravely embraced the neophyte’s challenge of figuring out their sound.
